"Nobody Wants This": Rabbi and "bad date" podcaster fall in love, with a gay dad and a lesbian best friend

 

I certainly didn't want to see a tv show called Nobody Wants This, a romcom about a rabbi and an agnostic girl who fall in love.  But I needed a half hour series, and it stars Adam Brody, who has played gay characters, and Kristen Bell, whose character was bisexual-vague in The Good Place.  So maybe there will be some gay representation.

Scene 1: Joanne, Kristen Bell, runs away from a guy during their first date because he starts crying about how he lost his grandmother -- when he was 12!   Switch to her podcast, where she asks "Am I the asshole?"  30 minutes of the date, and she learned that Grandma was a Rockette, and spent 42 years with her soulmate, William.  A little much.

Sister Morgan: You always do this.  You meet a nice guy, and find something wrong with him.  It's like you don't want to be in a relationship. Who wants to watch a podcast about Joanne's relationship trouble?  Oh, wait, this is a whole tv show about it.

Scene 2: Switch to Noah (Adan Brody) talking to his brother, Sasha, Timothy Simmons, who is heterosexual -- "Is Esther cheating on me?"

 "No, you have to stop letting Mom cut your hair. It's dumb."  Inside, they prepare to watch the game with a lady named Beck, whom Noah kisses.  

She was snooping around and found an engagement ring in a locked drawer, so she started planning the wedding.  Noah wanted to ask, so it would be romantic. Besides, invasion of privacy.  They argue; he dumps her.

Scene 3: Jeanne, Morgan, and an old guy, Michael Hitchcock, having dinner.  Wait, there's an old lady on the other side of the booth; it's the anniversary of the day Mom and Dad got divorced!  

Mom explains to the cute waiter, Keith Walker, that they were ecstatically happy for 32 years, but then he became "a bit confused about his sexuality."  Oh, no, not another "you're just confused."  That's ancient!

She continues: "It's very trendy to be gay these days, so he switched." 

Jeanne and her sister cut her off before she says anything else stupid.

Later, Jeanne gets a phone call from a Bigwig, who wants to "talk acquisition, a spin-off, and a book deal.  Just keep having wacky relationship problems."  Uh-oh, Girlfriend is finding true love later this episode.

Scene 4: Jeanne in bed, thinking of podcast ideas, when her best friend Ashley calls to invite her to a dinner party tonight.

"Who's going to be there?" Jeanne asks with a frown. "Bunch of lesbians?"  Why don't you like LGBT people, Jeanne?  Angry because your dad turned gay?

Best friend Ashley assures her that some heterosexuals are invited, including some men that she can date and find something wrong with for the podcast: a divorced dude with a kid, so you can make fun of him for being a bad dad; a finance guy who can't talk about anything else; and a rabbi, so you can make circumcision jokes. 

Jeanne is excited.  "They sound awful!  I'll be there!"

Scene 5: The party, in a huge mansion...um, middle class house.  Mostly women, a heterosexual male-female couple, a fruity guy flirting with a woman.  

Jeanne kisses best friend Ashley on the mouth, and gets rejected. "Ewww...not gay for you." Wait, you dislike gay people, remember? Or maybe you hate everybody, so it's not homophobia, it's misanthropy/misogyny? 

Next she sidles up to Noah, who thinks she's going through a crisis.  "No, I'm just in constant need of attention."  He has the same problem, constantly needing people to tell him he's cute. 

That reminds her -- "There's a rabbi here!  Let's find him so we can make fun of him!"  She points out a bearded guy on the other side of the room.

As everyone goes in to dinner, Joanne seeks out Best Friend Ashley.  "I think I'm really into the Divorced Guy!"  

"Good.  He's a horrible person, a condescending asshole, perfect for your podcast."  Funny, that doesn't sound like Noah....

Big Reveal after the break. Caution: Explicit.

"The Strongest Man in History": Robert Oberst and his pals recreate Viking challenges. With bonus Danish dick

  

In The Strongest Man in History, on the History Channel, four contemporary strongmen try to recreate the stunts of legendary strongmen:

William Bankier, who lifed a piano in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show.

Thomas Topham, who lifted three barrels of water weighing over 5,000 pounds in 1749.

Monte Saldo, who lifted a motorcar and five passengers in 1903 

The guys: 

1. Brian Shaw, "Shaw Strength"

2. Eddie Hall, "The Beast"

3. Robert Oberst, "Strong and Pretty"

4. Nick Best

I watched the first episode, where Nick takes the guys on a tour of Moorhead, Minnesota, across border from Fargo, North Dakota, the "center of Viking culture in the United States."

 Nick is a devotee of all things Viking, even going to Renaissance fairs wearing a horned helmet.  His signature stunt is the Viking Press.

They visit the stave church at the Hjelmkomst Center, go ice fishing, and hear about how the days of the week are named after Norse gods.  But for some reason they skip the biggest tourist attraction in Moorhead, the Hjelmkomst Viking Ship.  It's a replica built by Robert Asp in the 70s that sailed across the ocean to Norway before being housed in the Clay County Cultural Center

Most of the episode is devoted to the guys introducing themselves, explaining what they're going to do, discussing how difficult it will be, and then doing it:

1. Carry a 345-pound boulder. All Viking boys had to carry one to achieve fullsterkur, full strength, and be considered a man.  In Iceland, they still use the 409-pound Húsafell Stone as a test of strength.

Left: 18 year old Billy Crawford, the youngest person ever to lift the stone.

2. Thow a 13-pound hammer, with an ice bath penalty for the guy with the shortest distance. Nick loses, at 70 feet. 

3. Pull a 12,000 pound Viking ship.

4. Hoist a 1,433 pound mast. 

Some of the challenges in other episodes are interesting.  In Stoke-on-Trent, Eddie Hall's home town, they named an oat cake, sort of a savory stuffed pancake, after him.  It has six sausages and three pounds of cheese.  The challenge: whoever finishes first without throwing up wins.

In the last scene, the guys gift Nick with an authentic Viking-era axe, leading to a group hug and: "So, we all going to get on the bed and start making out?"  They jump on the bed, but we cut before the make-out session.

Beefcake: The guys are fully clothed most of the time.

History: Snippets.

Gay Subtexts: Deliberate.  An extraordinary amount of buddy-bonding, with the guys often discussing how attractive they find each other.

Reality TV: The breathless "It's 12,000 pounds!!!!" and the constant repetition become annoying.  I might watch this on the treadmill at the gym, but for regular viewing, it's too darn fluffy.

Bonus Danish dick and other Scandinavian guys after the break.  Warning: Explicit.

Andrew Keegan: From "Teenage Caveman" and "The Broken Hearts Club" to...well, he got to kiss Dean Cain

 

Teenage Caveman, 2002, is not a good movie.  You find out instantly that the cavemen are actually living in a post-Apocalyptic world.  But it's good for beefcake.  Some of the guys strip to show their butts while preparing for sex.  Stephen Jasso, who plays Vincent, also had unsimulated sex in the controversial, "show everything" Ken Park (pics after the break).

And it gave us a memorable scene where the hunky 23-year old Andrew Keegan, playing the head teenage caveman, is tied to a post with his hands over his head, showing us his bulked-up post-teen idol physique. 

Born in 1979, Andrew Keegan was one of the more popular teen stars of the 1990s, playing mostly operators, rebels, and scallawags, such as Zack Dell in Camp Nowhere (1994), and "bad boys" in guest roles on TGIF sitcoms like  Full House, Moesha, Step by Step, and Boy Meets World.

By the late 1990s, he was starting to bulk up, and the teen magazines started going wild.  They specialized in shots of his bare chest peeking out from his shirt, as if he had been caught in the midst of getting dressed (or undressed).

Gay-vague  "not into girls" roles on Party of Five (1997-98) and Seventh Heaven (1997-2004), led to  Broken Hearts Club (2000): 

Andrew played Kevin, one of a group of gay friends who hang out in West Hollywood (others include Timothy Olyphant, Billy Porter, Justin Theroux, and Zach Branff).  They deal with coming out, AIDS, and so on.  Kevin kisses mysterious newcomer Cole, played by Dean Cain, something that was unheard-of for two straight actors in 2000.

Andrew didn't quite make the transition to adult hunk.  During the 2000s, he performed mostly in horror and sex comedies, like Extreme Dating, 2005: Four friends hatch a crazy sceme to get one of them laid.

He plays Sally Boy in Dough Boys, 2008, which is not about World War I, it's about a bakery. And his character is straight.

He produced and starred in A Christmas Too Many (2007), which includes a gay stereotype son among the relatives that Mickey Rooney invites to Christmas dinner. It gets a 14% on Rotten Tomatoes.

More after the break. Caution: explicit